Dwelling delight: inhabiting the body inhabiting the city
To ask, what might our urban future look like; to imagine new avenues for urban form and function yet to come; and to project viable scenarios that could take us there, is a peculiarly cognitive act: that of logical and associative thought. What is more, the words we so commonly use in the talk of urban futures are almost exclusively grounded in our experience of visual perception. Such conceptual metaphors, however, do not only influence the way we talk about things, but shape our very thoughts and actions.1
There are of course very good reasons to use our minds in this particular way and talk about it the way we do. After all, the current story of our own species is about the mutually reinforcing co-evolution of bipedal motion, vision and cognition that brought us here. However, the way we privilege the use of our brains and rely on eyesight, both literally and figuratively, is not (only) due to “hard-wired” physiology crafted to howsoever adaptive perfection over millennia.
It is also revealing of an “ocular bias”, a cultural hegemony of the eye, whose long genealogy is now globalising in variegated capillary form across the planet. Speaking of cities and urban futures past, “[t]he art of the eye has certainly produced imposing and thought-provoking structures, but it has not facilitated human rootedness in the world. [...] modernist design at large has housed the intellect and the eye, but it has left the body and the other senses, as well as our memories, imagination and dreams, homeless.”2
Cognitive and energy architecture, multisensory design, neuro-urbanism, sound walks, smell maps and the like, are but some references of an increasing number of initiatives that explore new avenues leading us to the embodied sensory city. They give reason to believe that the stylised critique could be unstripped, just like the spectres of modernist design. Unfortunately, the lack of institutional attention and scale leave the potential of such interventions largely untapped.
To make matters worse, there are barriers, old and new, that block our way to experience urban space fully with the joy of having a body. Trapped in motorised gridlock and the urban monotone of standardised office- scapes, contemporary urban life still oscillates between sensory overload and deprivation. Digital technologies – one take-away of the current epidemic – might help carve a different landscape into our urban lives, and maybe for the better. However, it might even further fuel ongoing trends of privatising space and exacerbate all kinds of inequality. And even those considered privileged might find themselves trapped in a screen-based society of digitally connected minds, stripped off their bodies altogether.
So, let’s build urban worlds with words and reformulate the question from above: what could and should the future city feel like? What are the forms and intensities of urban experience we would like to design spaces for in the first place? What could be appropriate building structures and materials that resonate and speak to us as complex embodied selves – earth and wood, concrete and stone, or as well light and shadow, sound and scent?
This shift from look to feeling might appear subtle, yet it is profound. It is by no means self-complacent quibbling. Nor does it discard the achievements of vision, thought and perspective. It simply acknowledges
that “the built environment is one thing, how people dwell in it another”3. That is why we need to “go back (in)to the body, which is where all the splits in Western culture occur”4 – splits such as between set and setting, interior and exterior, space and place, thought and emotion, ville and cité, urbanist and urbanite.
So what now? To get things moving we should overcome our obsession with nuisance abatement, not get too satisfied with comfort and convenience and head for full-body sensory delight. For, if the city is here to stay, we need to learn how to better inhabit our body in order to fully inhabit our urban environment.
Ridding the air of pollutants, for instance, will be necessary. However, this alone does not say anything about the actual composition of molecules we want to breathe. And besides: the quality of breathing, as embodied practice and experience, has not much to do with objectified standards of air quality as such. The same goes for other sensory dimensions – when and where does sound turn into noise? How does silence sound? If scent and smell are powerful carriers of memory, how to design olfactory spaces to anchor history and a sense of place?
If a human is “a rolling conversation with the land from which it comes and of which it consists – but a more stilted, stuttering conversation than that of most wild animals”5 – then, reinventing cities we live in might start by asking the question, what kind of urban animal we are evolving to and what relationship we would like to have with our urban land.
Let’s have this conversation.
Christian Pollok / Urbanist & urbanite / Policy advisor at the municipality of Forest-Brussels /
For more information: stadtsinn@posteo.eu
1 Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, Metaphors We Live by.
2 Pallasmaa, 2005, pp. 17-19, The Eyes of the Skin. Architecture and the Senses.
3 Sennett, 2018, p.1, Building and Dwelling. Ethics for the City.
4 Quote attributed to experimental artist Carolee Schneemann.
5 Foster, 2016, p.20, Being a Beast.